Legolas' Little Foibles
by Rosepoison
Summary: No one's perfect, including a certain platinum-blonde that some weird mix of warrior and elf prince. Here are just a few of his lessor qualities. (In story form, pure speculation.) No pairings.


The Fellowship had finally made a decision concerning Legolas. It came through many campfire meetings (while the elf was on watch), whispers, and the occasional wink. Their decision was final, and irrevocable: Legolas Thranduilion was completely nuts.

**Example 1:**

Pippin can distinctly remember a certain week when the only thing they'd found for miles were orcs. No food, no water, no shelter . . . okay, so there were trees all over the place, but only that Elven Prince and Aragorn were comfortable up there. And, since it was fall, the trees gave them just about zero cover from the torrential rainstorms they were experiencing.

Point is, with their tents in tatters, their legs (and hind quarters) to sore to even THINK climbing a tree, and with rain almost constantly pouring down, Aragorn was pretty happy.

No, no, that came out wrong. What Pippin meant was that everyone was so covered in muck theY could hardly see. Though Legolas and Gimli had it the worst. Ugh, all that hair. Pippin wouldn't be surprised to hear that they ended up EATING some of that mud.

Well, Gimli, at least, but that isn't the point. (Gandalf had taken a few precautions, so his luscious head of hair was mostly untainted.)

After a few days of muck-trekking, the sun came out. I mean REALLY came out. It nearly baked the Fellowship into cocoons of mud (and other substances consisting of their measly gruel, orc-blood, and a few other things Pippin would rather not think about. Ever.)

But, contrary to popular oppinion, Legolas didn't wig-out. Once. The most complaning he did was purely silent- disgustedly wiping his face, or trying (in vain) to get a stick or particularly large glob of mud out of his once-blond hair. Really, he kept quiet during most of the incident. Gimli was doing most of the grumbling, now that Pippin thinks of it.

Mercy of mercies, at the hottest part of the day, they came upon, not a puddle, not a stream, but an entire LAKE. The Fellowship was so excited they sounded like the tower of Babel- a jumble of languages so complete you couldn't understand them if you tried. Well, except that joy is the universal language.

Most of them just jumped in at first sight, not even bothering to shed their clothes. But Legolas, the Elven bowman, prince, and high elf, quite literally up to his ears in mud, waded into the water with the utmost dignity. He eventually got deep enough to safely dive under . . . and stayed there for a good ten minutes.

The others were in a panic when Legolas FINALLY deemed it the time to resurface. The elf practically blinded the others as the sun shone off his platinum blond hair.

A round of a glares that would kill a normal human solicited nothing more than a cocky smirk and comment about "sour grapes".

"Blasted pointy-eared, long-haired, condescending . . ." the rest of Strider's no doubt to be obscene grumblings were cut off as he dived below the surface.

**Example 2:**

One point about Legolas that sticks out in Aragorn's memory would be a campfire story the elf once told. Campfire, HA! More like horror story. What was worse, it was derived from the archer's own _memory_:

_The fire crackles restlessly, almost mirroring the feelings of the group gathered around it. They shuffle their feet, run their hands through their hair, or stroke their beards. Finally, Estel cracks. _

_"Oh, come ON, Legolas. You've lived for thousands of years and have had just as many adventures, we get it! Stop stalling and pick one!" the elf prince simply chuckles at the outburst._

_"So direct? Really Mellon nin . . ." _

_"Mellon nin nothing! Get on with the story!" Legolas smiles again, puts his hands behind his head, and leans back, closing his eyes. _

_"Fine, fine. You're getting pushy, Estel. A favorite story of mine starts back many, MANY years ago. I'd say when Gandalf was in his thirties" the archer jerks his chin towards the knarled wizard "I was pretty young myself, but the experience is still fresh, as if it only happened last decade . . ." _

**. . . . . .**

_"My home was not quite so . . . aracnid free . . . as it is now. We pretty much left the spiders alone and vice-versa, unless you were stupid enough to stumble into one of their webs. My father though of them as an ugly, highly toxic annoyance. One year, however, the 'peace treaty' sort of collapsed."_

_"What happened?" Pippin asks, wide-eyed. _

_His question is returned with a glare and short "I'm getting to that." _

_"It was like some sort of invasion- if you took two steps outside you had to scrape your boots off, the ground was so covered with the things._

_"One week, it was so bad, we were quite literally EATING arachnids. But that isn't what caused my father to declare all-out **war** on any eight-legged creature in sight . . ."_

_Legolas pauses for a second, pleased to see his companions unconsciously leaning forward. _

_"It was when I awoke, one day, to my mother's screams. I jumped up, wanting to go to her aid. she fainted dead away. The my mother the queen had thought I was dead . . ."_

_The Fellowship is now leaning in so close, they're almost knocking skulls._

_"It turns out it was just a new breed of those fanged vermin. A sort of over-sized tick, you could say, that had been at my scalp all night. Since head wounds bleed profusely, as I'm sure Estel will tell you, they left a fairly gruesome stain on my pillow. _

_"Now, my mother was not the fainting type, but having bugs literally everywhere, believing their child to be dead, and then seeing them 'come back' per-se, would make any woman collapse. _

_"That episode drove my father to the brink._

_"For the next few days, I heard him do little else but growl, and swat wayward insects. Eventually, he called a meeting, and it was unanimously decided we were going to get rid of the intruders in one fell swoop- poisoning the __Lórien supplies."_

_"In heaven's name, WHY?" Frodo sputters._

_"What else could we do? Stomp around until the things were all squashed to pieces? Set __Lórien __on fire? For elves, time is nothing. Moving from our home for a few months, then moving back, would only cause a small shift in our lives. And at least we'd have a home to come back to afterwards."_

**_. . . . . . _**

_"So you say your father wanted something to be done **right then **but still agreed to a plan that would take at least a season to complete? Ridiculous!" Gimli counters._

_"I have stated my father's reasons, though it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, and, if you'll excuse me, I have a watch to take over." Legolas melts into the shadows as Merry arrives back._

_"Mr. Legolas, you can . . . He just left, didn't he?"_

. . .

Ah, yet more proof that elves are slippery little so-and-sos.

**Example 3:**

Gimli can say one thing, and one thing only to prove his point here: Have you ever seen Legolas (or elves in general) bathe? They're like machines-precise and perfect in **every** detail.

If you looked long enough, you could feel yourself being hypnotized by the spectical.

Please, remember that Gimli is no peeping Tom, it's just that when you're on the road with someone long enough, and you basically stop at every stream you can find to wash off the day's dust, you get to know how they bathe.

Altogether a bit more than you'd rather think about.

But back to the main subject. Legolas, he has a _system_ for how many times he coats each appendage with soap. A. SYSTEM. Ten strokes per arm, five per leg, and his hair . . . Gah . . . No wonder the stuff reflects light like a mirror.

Alright, so most of the time Legolas does a quick, sloppy job because the Fellowship is being hounded by some unforeseen enemy. But when he _really_ washes it . . . Just watching will drive you mad. But he has a few other bad habits.

A) He picks out every. Single. Knot. Individually. It's enough to drive Gimli to shave his friend bald, or go five miles out of his way and find another stream.

B) Legolas picks at the split ends, wordlessly complaining about them, but really screaming those complaints to anyone watching. Luckily, this habit only manifests itself while he's in the water, and not while they're on the road.

C) One of the elf's out-of-water habits would be fiddling with his pack strap. On the _extremely_ rare occasions that they saddle their archer with any large weight, he twiches with an straps hanging down. Maybe it's because he's uncomfortable with being slowed down, but it's maddening to anyone unlucky enough to notice.

D) A final . . . defect of the prince's would be his unconscious 5-3 foot tapping when consentrating. Playing any sort of strategy game with him is almost impossible if you aren't stone-deaf. Or in a grassy area.

. . . . .

Honestly, no one in this rag-tag group is perfect. They all have their vices and weaknesses, but do Legolas' have to be _annoying_?

**.'.'.'.**

**Note:**

**As I'm sure you know, this is all made-up, and complete speculation on some of Legolas' character.**


End file.
